The Sunday night before Thanksgiving, in Scottsdale, Arizona, retired hockey pro (and ascendant broadcasting bro) Paul Bissonnette went out to get a salad and wound up getting his head kicked in instead. The 39-year-old former major and minor leaguer described the events on his Twitter account the next day, saying he’d encountered half a dozen “drunk golfers” who were harassing restaurant workers and that he’d fought them all en masse, giving as good as he got.
He didn’t say the words “You shoulda seen the other guy(s),” but I imagined the other guys anyway: probably a bunch of sunburned clowns in extra-smedium polos, all of whom realized far too late that the guy they were attacking used to fight pro athletes for sport, thankyouverymuch. An unexpected holiday tableau, to be sure—and also, we’d come to find out, a totally incomplete one.
In the days since, what had initially seemed to be a one-off, wrong-place, wrong-time encounter has unspooled into an entire socio-criminological saga, one filled with mischief, mayhem, murder, Barstool fans, classic Brad Pitt and Brad Marchand performances, and a global network of unscrupulous asphalt artistes. And there at the center of it all, as ever, is Biz: a guy who just wanted his Sunday salad.
If you read that last paragraph and thought “… ?” or “… Da fuuuk is a ‘Biz’?” or “None of these words, except murder and mischief, are in the Bible,” then fear not: I am here to answer all of your questions and concerns, beginning with the query I’m sure you all have.
[Extremely Penny Lane voice.] What kind of salad?
Ah, glad you asked. If this were a movie (or a Ben Mezrich book proposal), it would all start with the salad—a loving tracking shot, perhaps, of a sous-chef grabbing a handful of lettuce as, unbeknownst to him, all hell breaks loose in the dining room.
According to Bissonnette’s retelling of the inciting event on his NHL podcast Spittin’ Chiclets, the salad that launched a thousand fists was the “Traditional Salad” at the chain (but, like, classy chain) restaurant Houston’s steakhouse in Scottsdale. The menu describes it as: “chopped egg, bacon, rustic croutons, with your choice of dressing.” Bissonnette mentioned Thousand Island as his dressing of choice. “I would die for that Traditional Salad,” Biz said, and you know what? He kind of almost did!
Houston’s steakhouse: Who knew?!
Bissonnette said on the podcast that he goes to Houston’s three or four times a week! Which is one of the reasons he felt so protective of the staff when some rowdy patrons started harassing them.
Sorry to circle back here, but who exactly is this “Biz” guy anyway?
Paul Bissonnette played over 200 games in the NHL, for the Pittsburgh Penguins and the now-defunct Phoenix Coyotes, scoring seven goals in his big-league career and racking up 340 penalty minutes. He was a yapper and an enforcer and a huge pain in the ass. One time, when he was playing in the minor leagues for the Wheeling Nailers, he brought a WWE-style championship belt onto the ice during warm-ups to mock an opposing player whom he’d whupped twice in fights that season.
It’s that energy that he has brought to his post-playing career as an unexpectedly crème-de-la-crème broadcaster, both on the ribald Barstool podcast Spittin’ Chiclets and on a joyously irreverent TNT studio show, where he plays a kind of Charles Barkley role and in the process manages to make Wayne Gretzky … pretty funny?
What does “spittin’ chiclets” mean?
Chiclets is hockey-speak for teeth, and you spit ’em when you lose ’em. Blessedly, Biz mentioned on the pod that he somehow didn’t lose any chiclets in his six-on-one donnybrook the other night.
Ah, right, the donnybrook. So what exactly happened here?
As Biz tells it, he was minding his own biz-ness (sorry) at a very crowded Houston’s, where, despite being a regular, he’d had to wait a bit for a table—there were no seats available at the bar. Meanwhile, a multigenerational group of fellas were told they couldn’t order drinks at the bar without being seated, and they did not take kindly to the restaurant’s protocol.
Bissonnette says one moment they were yelling, and the next moment they were threatening restaurant workers, and then he told them that if they wanted to fight someone so badly, he’d be glad to meet them outside. Fists started to fly, and it all devolved from there. Bissonnette’s description of the fight includes:
- losing his shirt and his shoes
- using a statue in the lobby of the restaurant and, later, a dumpster as cover
- absorbing punches and kicks to the head
- coldcocking an old dude who rushed toward him like Ferdinand the bull
- the sobering realization mid-fight that if he wasn’t careful, he could wind up unconscious—and that if he became unconscious, who knows what could have happened
What aspect of the fight was the hockey-est?
Probably when Biz, while recapping it all on his pod, described losing his shirt by saying: “My tarp got ripped off.” The show Letterkenny is a documentary.
How did the fight end?
According to court documents, Bissonnette was on the ground, being kicked “in what appeared to be his head/neck area,” when one of the defendants “attempted to kick him again, but missed and fell backwards, allowing the victim to get up and run to a nearby business.” (Bissonnette said the business was a CVS with a freaked-out clerk.)
The assailants were arrested, and on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the men’s mug shots were released, as were their names: Henry Mesker, John Carroll, William Carroll, Danny Bradley, Edward Jennings, and Sean Daley. Bissonnette’s podcast cohost, Ryan Whitney, another former NHL player, observed soon after that the pugilistic six-pack was “maybe the most Minifan looking crew to ever exist”—a reference to fans of the Boston sports radio host Kirk Minihane and a suggestion that this was one Irish-coded group. What’s funny is that at the time, he didn’t even know the half of it.
So what’s the deal with these guys? Were they frat bros overserved at a bachelor party? Local Scottsdale ruffians? Guys in town for a Ford/Chrysler dealer conference who got too much sun out on the links?
Somehow, none of the above. Turns out these guys might not be your run-of-the-mill amateur bar brawlers—they could be seasoned professionals.
On November 26, the day the mug shots and names of Biz’s sparring partners were released, a Twitter user going by the name Shea Stevens and the handle @WhistleblowerCA did a little digging and struck gold. Well, first he struck asphalt: When he looked up the names of the men, some appeared to be connected to people and businesses involved in a web of driveway-paving and other home-improvement scams that often targeted older people. And that was just the beginning: Stevens, along with a consortium of other amateur detectives from across Barstool Nation and professional Arizonan reporters, quickly uncovered wild connections and digital crumbs scattered from Pebble Beach to North Dakota.
What were some of the other things they uncovered?
- Only a couple of hours before the Houston’s brouhaha, a remarkably similar-looking group of dudes—right down to the ringleader in the bright green golf shirt—was at a golf course restaurant. And green-shirt guy attacked the waitstaff for having the nerve to tell them that the place was closing for the day. “He got in my face immediately [and said], ‘I don’t listen to people. Nobody talks to me that way.’ Which I don’t really know what he meant by that,” said a Raven Golf Club employee identified as Carter on ABC15 news. “I was just saying it was time to go. I wasn’t swearing, I wasn’t being antagonistic, nothing like that. I step around the table, and he just runs at me, swings at me. He pins me up against the wall, hits me a couple times, we knock over a couple chairs, hits me again, clips me good in the temple, and I kind of go down, and by the time I looked back up they were gone.”
- One of the men is reportedly a relative of a woman (with the not-at-all-aptronym “Toogood”) who made national news in 2002 for slapping and punching her 4-year-old daughter in a department store parking lot (which was caught on the store’s security system).
- Another of the men appears to be the in-law of a suspect in a life insurance fraud scheme in which a housekeeper was murdered.
- One of the men was arrested after a 2012 incident in a North Dakota casino in which a supervisor asked him to please put out his cigarette, per local law; he refused; she asked him to leave; and then he “lunged across a blackjack table to grab casino chips, then flipped the table over and punched a male blackjack dealer in the face, [setting] off a fight involving 15 people, throwing beer bottles and broken chairs” and destroying four casino tables in the process, according to Arizona’s Family.
- All six of the guys seem to be part of a closely knit and elusive community known as Irish Travellers, a revelation that turns the whole Biz hullabaloo into just another supernova in an already sprawling and chaotic universe.
Wait—Irish Travellers? You mean like Bra—
Like Brad Pitt’s dag-lovin’, “me ma”–helpin’ character in the 2000 major motion picture Snatch, yep! (Poor Bill Paxton and Mark Wahlberg—how come no one remembers their performances as Irish Travellers in the 1997 film Traveller?) Tracing their Irish roots back centuries, these communities tend to marry from within, roam from place to place, and encourage a culture that is at once proud and paranoid.
Snatch was set in England, which is also where the real-world rising-star boxer Tyson Fury, who calls himself “the Gypsy King,” grew up in the Irish Traveller community. But there are bands of Irish Travellers here in the U.S.—anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 people, noted Arizona’s Family. Many of them are clustered in utterly idiosyncratic towns like Murphy Village, South Carolina (as featured in the 2012 TLC program My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, a spinoff of a show that helped introduce the world to Paddy Doherty). Another hot spot is Fort Worth, Texas. That’s where a number of the men who fought Bissonnette appear to hail from and where they may have returned after being released from jail. One of the men—Sean Daley, who was charged with multiple felonies—has been ordered to come back to Arizona on December 10 for his next court date, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll show—as he told a judge, “I can try to make it.”
He … “can TRY”???
On the one hand, I’m actually envious of that level of DGAF moxie. On the other hand, being this unfazed by consequences is pretty scary to contemplate, and in hindsight, Bissonnette is lucky he wasn’t more seriously injured.
How has Bissonnette been dealing with everything now that all the adrenaline has worn off?
It’s been interesting to watch Biz cycle through a whole host of emotions as he processes the severity of what went down. Like, he’ll talk about how hard he focused on not losing consciousness out in the parking lot that night—and then he’ll turn around a few moments later and try to lighten the mood by joking that in his playing days, this would’ve been business as usual. “I used to do this every Friday, Saturday night and then have to bus to the next city and unpack my gear at 2 in the morning,” he said on his podcast last week.
With classic Biz machismo, he has ranted that he’d be happy to sidestep the legal process and take on each guy—one-on-one this time—in a Fort Worth barn. In longtime Biz parlance, he’s been referring to everything that went down as a “worldwind.” And with welcome Biz charisma, he’s been back on the air doing what he does best: (1) prop humor and (2) making listeners and viewers feel immersed in the world(wind) of hockey, like we’re one of the buds.
How is the hockey world reacting to this?
Well, there might be no better proxy for the hockey mind than Boston Bruins smirklord captain Brad Marchand, who was interviewed on Biz’s TNT studio show a few days after the fight. Here’s how the exchange went:
Bissonnette: My question for you is: When [Joe] Sacco took over as head coach, what was the main message you took away when he first addressed the team?
Marchand: Thanks, Biz. A bit of a boring question from you. … I thought it’d be a good one.
[Marchand proceeds to give an appropriately boring answer that includes the phrase “make sure we’re really detailed defensively” and then takes some questions from the other anchors—one about a teammate, one about Thanksgiving plans.]
Bissonnette: Brad, Biz here again. I know my first one was a little “boring,” but did one of those offseason surgeries include a Turkish hair transplant? You're looking a little less thin up top. It looks great!
Marchand: [chuckling] No, bud. I just try to look like those guys who beat the wheels off you the other day.
Now that is what it’s all about. No physical violence necessary: just two hockey wise guys spiritually nut-tapping one another, each operating at the top of their game. I felt as though I’d been transported inside an NHL locker room, suddenly privy to the good kind of fight.
So in the end, what came of the big Sunday night scrap?
It’s hard to say, since “the end” of this mess hasn’t even arrived yet. Maybe little will change for the roving band of haymaker throwers, or maybe this new level of attention on their ongoing shenanigans will yield a little bit of justice. As for Bissonnette, he certainly got a boost in exposure and admiration for his troubles—though I suspect he’d rather just have his tarp un-ripped and his bell un-rung and that “Traditional Salad” with Thousand Island dressing in peace. It’s not all bad, though: That Houston’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, came out on top. Something tells me the wait there is about to get longer.
